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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Marxism & Communism
This study explores the history of the "new school" that developed
in the immediate postwar period and its role in communicating
antifascism to young people in the Soviet zone. Blessing traces how
the decisions about how to educate young people after twelve years
of a National Socialist dictatorship became part of a broader
discussion about the future of the German nation.
This volume examines concepts of central planning, a cornerstone of
political economy in Soviet-type societies. It revolves around the
theory of "optimal planning" which promised a profound
modernization of Stalinist-style verbal planning. Encouraged by
cybernetic dreams in the 1950s and supporting the strategic goals
of communist leaders in the Cold War, optimal planners offered the
ruling elites a panacea for the recurrent crises of the planned
economy. Simultaneously, their planning projects conveyed the pride
of rational management and scientific superiority over the West.
The authors trace the rise and fall of the research program in the
communist era in eight countries of Eastern Europe, including the
Soviet Union, and China, describing why the mission of optimization
was doomed to fail and why the failure was nevertheless very slow.
The theorists of optimal planning contributed to the rehabilitation
of mathematical culture in economic research in the communist
countries, and thus, to a neoclassical turn in economics all over
the ex-communist world). However, because they have not rejected
optimal planning as "computopia," there is a large space left
behind for future generations to experiment with Big Optimal Plans
anew-based, at this time, on artificial intelligence and machine
learning.
Karl Marxs CAPITAL Introductory Essay By A. D. LINDSAY Master of
Balliol College, Oxford LONDON OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS HUMPHREY
MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMEN HOUSE, E. G. 4 LONDON
EDINBURGH GLASGOW LEIPZIG NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPETOWN
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI HUMPHREY MILFORD PUBLISHER TO THE
UNIVERSITY Impression of First edition, 1925 Printed in Great
Britain PREFACE I OWE much in the preparation of this book to Mr.
Beers Karl Marx, Sein Leben und Seine Lehre, and to Mr. G. W.
Portuss Marx and Modern Thought, published for the Workers
Educational Association in Australia. How much I have been helped
in Chapters III and IV by M. Elie Halevys La Formation du
Radicalisms Philosophique will be evident to all who know that
great work. Though I differ widely from Mr. H. W. B. Joseph, I have
been greatly helped by his demonstration in Karl Marxs Theory of
Value of the indefensibility of doctrines often ascribed to Marx.
But above all I wish to acknowledge my debt, for their discussion
and criticism, to those to whom the lectures from which this book
has been made were first delivered the Glasgow audiences meeting
under the auspices of the Independent Labour Party and the Workers
Educational Association and in par ticular to Mr. John McLure and
to Mr. D. Kennedy of the Glasgow Independent Labour Party. My
references throughout are to the English translation of Marxs
Capital, but in the quotations from Marx I have in many passages
made my own corrections in that translation. A. D. L. BALLIOL
COLLEGE, OXFORD. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 9 I. Marx and Hegel 15 II.
Economic Determinism . . .27 III. The Labour Theory of Value . - S3
IV. Marxs account of Surplus Value and of theCollective Labourer .
. .81 V. Marx and Rousseau . . . .109 INDEX 126 INTRODUCTION THIS
small book is intended, as were the lectures in which it first took
form, to be an introduction to the study of Marxs Capital. It is
not meant to be a substitute for such study. It is the fate of all
great books tp get bcdleA-down and served up cold in text-books,
which purport to tell exactly what the great book comes to, as
though a mans conclusions were worth very much apart from the way
in which he arrived at them. We must all have had the experience,
after reading even appreciative books about great authors, of going
back to the authors themselves and finding how much more there is
in them than their commentators lead us to expect. Marxs Capital is
obviously a book of historical importance, and any one who reads it
impartially will find it greater and far more illuminating than
most critics of Marx would like us, or most Marxian writers allow
us to believe. There are two ways in which it is indefensible to
treat a great book, ways which seem nevertheless to characterize
much of what is said of Marx in this country the way of uncritical
condemnation and the way. of uncritical praise. There are some
books on Marx in which are collected all his inconsistencies and
nothing else, as though there was nothing in Marx but
inconsistencies. Such books give the impression that Marx was one
of the most muddle-headed, idiots that ever lived. On the other
hand, some of his interpreters seem to have given up the belief in
the verbal insgiratipn of scripture for the belief in the verbal
inspiration of Capital and try to maintain that there are no
inconsistencies in Marx at all. 2535 61 B io Introduction Wemight
surely be prepared, without having read a word of Marx, to reject
both these extreme views. Mere inconsistent thinking has never made
history as Capital has made it. But no man who has brought about a
great revolution in thought has ever been without inconsistencies.
The original thinker is too much occupied in trying to express the
creative thought which is welling up in him to trouble himself
about getting it all straightened out. There are always parts of
his work which he has taken over as they stood from other people...
The demise of the French Communist Party (PCF) has been a recurrent
feature of overviews of the Left in France for the past two
decades, and yet the Communists survive. This study examines the
factors that undermined the position of the PCF as the premier
party of France, but also highlights the challenges that the party
faces in a society disillusioned with politics, and the new
strategies that it is developing in order to revive its
fortunes.
Very little has been written on the political implications of
diverse accounts of "virtue, "vice," and "moral character," and
even less has been offered on this subject from any identifiably
leftist perspective. This book begins by demonstrating the
plausibility of a "Marxist ethics" in general; the author then
proceeds to work out an understanding of moral character itself and
its role in living a "good life," based on a historical materialist
philosophical anthropology. This leads to an analysis of which
character traits should be considered virtues and vices, and what
would count as a successful or unsuccessful moral education, within
the context of contemporary North American society. The text
concludes by focusing on the problems associated with identifying
real-life, useful exemplifications of such virtuous and vicious
character.
Russian conservatism is making a forceful return after a century of
experimenting with socialism and liberalism. Conservatism is about
managing change by ensuring that modernization evolves organically
by building on the past. Conservatism has a natural attraction for
Russia as its thousand-year long history is largely characterized
by revolutionary change - the destructive process of uprooting the
past to give way to modernity. Navigating towards gradual and
organic modernization has been a key struggle ever since the
Mongols invaded in the early 13th century and decoupled Russia from
Europe and the arteries of international trade. Russian history has
consisted of avoiding revolutions that are either caused by falling
behind on modernization or making great leaps forward that disrupts
socio-economic and political traditions. Russian conservatives are
now tasked with harmonizing the conservative ideas of the 19th
century with the revolutionary changes that shaped Russia in the
20th century. The rise of Asia now provides new opportunities as it
enables Russia to overcome its fixation on the West and develop a
unique Russian path towards modernization that harmonizes its
Eurasian geography and history.
Longlisted for South Africa's 2022 Sunday Times Non-fiction Award
Definitive and gripping narrative history of the Communist Party of
South Africa. Renowned historian Tom Lodge has written an immensely
readable and compelling sweep of history, spanning continents and
the last hundred years, producing the first comprehensive account
of the South African Communist Party in all its intricacies. Taking
the story back to the party's pre-history in the early 20th century
reveals that it was shaped by a range of socialist traditions and
that their influence persisted and were decisive. The party's
engagement in popular front politics after 1935 has been largely
uncharted: this book supplies fresh detail. In the 1940s the author
shows how the party became a key actor in the formation of black
working-class politics, and hitherto unused archival materials as
well as the insights from an increasingly candid genre of
autobiographies make possible a much fuller picture of the secret
party of 1952 to 1965. Despite its concealment and tiny numbers,
its intellectual impact on black South African mainstream politics
was considerable. On the exile period, the author examines the
activities of the party's recruits and more informal following
inside South Africa, as well as the scope and nature of its broader
influence. In 1990, a year in which global politics would change
fundamentally, South African communists would return to South
Africa to begin the work of reconstructing their party as a legal
organisation. Throughout its history, the party had been inspired
and supported by the reality of existing socialism, state systems
embracing half of Europe and Asia, in which the ruling group was at
least notionally committed to the building of communist societies.
With the fall of Eastern European regimes and the fragmentation of
the Soviet Union, one key set of material foundations for the
party's programmatic beliefs crumbled and its most important
international alliances in the global socialist community in
Eastern Europe and Russia would end. Finally, Lodge brings the
story up to date, assessing the degree to which communists both
inside and outside government have shaped and influenced policy in
successive ANC-led administrations, particularly during the popular
resistance to apartheid during the 1950s, which was underpinned by
the party's systematic organisation in the localities that supplied
the ANC with its strongest bases. Jacana: Africa, India
A foundational essay of class struggle published in English for the
first time Considered one of the most important intellectuals in
Latin American social thought, Ruy Mauro Marini demonstrated that
underdevelopment and development are the result of relations
between economies in the world market, and the class relations they
engender. In The Dialectics of Dependency, the Brazilian
sociologist and revolutionary showed that, as Latin America came to
specialize in the production of raw materials and foodstuffs while
importing manufactured goods, a process of unequal exchange took
shape that created a transfer of value to the imperialist centers.
This encouraged capitalists in the periphery to resort to the
superexploitation of workers - harsh working conditions where wages
fall below what is needed to reproduce their labor power. In this
way, the economies of Latin America, which played a fundamental
role in facilitating a new phase of the industrial revolution in
western Europe, passed from the colonial condition only to be
rendered economically "dependent," or subordinated to imperialist
economies. This unbalanced relationship, which nonetheless allows
capitalists of both imperialist and dependent regions to profit,
has been reproduced in successive international divisions of labor
of world economy, and continues to inform the day-to-day life of
Latin American workers and their struggles. Written during an
upsurge of class struggle in the region in the 1970s, and published
here in English for the first time, the revelations inscribed in
this foundational essay are proving more relevant than ever. The
Dialectics of Dependency is an internationalist contribution from
one Latin American Marxist to dispossessed and oppressed people
struggling the world over, and a gift to those who struggle from
within the recesses of present-day imperialist centers--nourishing
today's efforts to think through the definition of "revolution" on
a global scale.
A BBC History Magazine Best Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Best
Book of the Year The history the Chinese Communist Party has tried
to erase: the dramatic political debates of the 1980s that could
have put China on a path to greater openness. On a hike in
Guangdong Province in January 1984, Deng Xiaoping was warned that
his path was a steep and treacherous one. "Never turn back," the
Chinese leader replied. That became a mantra as the government
forged ahead with reforms in the face of heated contestation over
the nation's future. For a time, everything was on the table,
including democratization and China's version of socialism. But
deliberation came to a sudden halt in spring 1989, with protests
and purges, massacre and repression. Since then, Beijing has worked
intensively to suppress the memory of this era of openness. Julian
Gewirtz recovers the debates of the 1980s, tracing the Communist
Party's diverse attitudes toward markets, state control, and
sweeping technological change, as well as freewheeling public
argument over political liberalization. The administration
considered bold proposals from within the party and without,
including separation between the party and the state, empowering
the private sector, and establishing an independent judiciary.
After Tiananmen, however, Beijing systematically erased these
discussions of alternative directions. Using newly available
Chinese sources, Gewirtz details how the leadership purged the key
reformist politician Zhao Ziyang, quashed the student movement,
recast the transformations of the 1980s as the inevitable products
of consensus, and indoctrinated China and the international
community in the new official narrative. Never Turn Back offers a
revelatory look at how different China's rise might have been and
at the foundations of strongman rule under Xi Jinping, who has
intensified the policing of history to bolster his own authority.
Presented here is an overview of the recent scholarship on the sub-
and counter-culture aspects of the Communist movement. The articles
cover Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, and
Finland, spanning the entire history of Communism, from the 1920s
to the 1980s. Such issues as ethnic organizations, cadre formation,
the Communist scouts movement, party families, and Communist
fiction are explored. Themes discussed include gender, ethnicity,
generation, local milieu, and the role of intellectuals.
James Klugmann appears as a shadowy figure in the legendary history
of the Cambridge spies. As both mentor and friend to Donald
Maclean, Guy Burgess and others, Klugmann was the man who
manipulated promising recruits deemed ripe for conversion to the
communist cause. This perception of him was reinforced following
the release of his MI5 file and the disclosure of Soviet
intelligence files in Moscow, which revealed he played a key part
in the recruitment of John Cairncross, the 'fifth man', and had a
pivotal war-time role in the Special Operations Executive, helping
shift Churchill and the allies to support Tito and the communist
partisans in Yugoslavia. In this book, Geoff Andrews reveals
Klugmann's story in full for the first time, uncovering the
motivations, conflicts and illusions of those drawn into the world
of communism - and the sacrifices they made on its behalf.
A Psychoanalytical-Historical Perspective on Capitalism and
Politics explores how empathy once shaped the collective
unconscious, before being replaced by rampant individualistic drive
to power. Mino Vianello uses "radical federalism" to define a new
approach to democracy, hoping for an end to the repetition of
outdated political and economic ideals to solve the world's
democratic crisis. The book brings together a multitude of
disciplines and perspectives, including Marxism, history, class,
feminism, politics and empathy, to provide a comprehensive and
honest history of power from the Enlightenment to the present day.
This interdisciplinary study will be key reading for academics and
scholars of Jungian studies, politics, sociology, history and
economics.
Washington Bullets is written in the best traditions of Marxist
journalism and history-writing. It is a book of fluent and readable
stories, full of detail about U.S. imperialism, but never letting
the minutiae obscure the larger political point. It is a book that
could easily have been a song of despair-a lament of lost causes;
it is, after all, a roll call of butchers and assassins; of plots
against people's movements and governments; of the assassinations
of socialists, Marxists, communists all over the Third World by the
country where liberty is a statue. Despite all this, Washington
Bullets is a book about possibilities, about hope, about genuine
heroes. One such is Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso-also
assassinated-who said: "You cannot carry out fundamental change
without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from
nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas,
the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday
for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be
one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future." Washington
Bullets is a book infused with this madness, the madness that dares
to invent the future.
The French Communist Party has traditionally been identified with
the urban working class but paradoxically its position as France's
main left-wing party was dependent upon support from the
countryside. "Communism in Rural France" explores for the first
time the party's complex and often misunderstood relationship with
agricultural labourers.During 1936 and 1937 a bitter struggle
between agricultural workers and farmers swept through parts of the
French countryside. Coinciding with the urban 'social explosion'
which followed the victory of the Popular Front government, the
strikes, farm occupations and increased unionisation panicked
farmers and shocked right-wing opinion, which blamed the spread of
the 'corrupting' collectivist influences of urban society into the
countryside on the French Communist Party."Communism in Rural
France" traces the evolution and characteristics of the
agricultural workers' movement from the turn of the 20th century
through the inter-war years, as well as the response of the
government and the resistance organised by farmers during 1936-37.
By focussing on agricultural workers, John Bulaitis sheds light on
a section of the rural population that has been generally
overlooked in French rural and labour history. "Communism in Rural
France" explores their relationship with the French Communist Party
and illuminates an important and previously neglected aspect of
European politics.
When American teacher June Mudan traveled to China in 2000 to teach
at a Chinese university, her goals were simple: to experience a new
culture and to help the Chinese people learn English. Over a year
later, she returned to the United States with much more, including
well-kept dark secrets of control, horror and death told to her by
a fellow Chinese teacher. "In The Dragon's Teeth "relates these
dark secrets lurking in China's past and becomes significant when
grim details are revealed about the Chinese Laogai, the name for
the system of labor and re-education camps throughout China. June's
teacher/friend had been a political prisoner in various camps and
experienced many atrocities, the sharing of which had a powerful
impact on the author's perceptions of China.
In America, we have become tantalized by the "Chinese Dragon"
and especially its low-priced wares, but "In The Dragon's Teeth
"provides the evidence that we need to become mindful of its sharp,
vicious teeth and how they were used to maim and kill perhaps 50
million Chinese citizens.
You have heard of the Nazi Holocaust and the Russian Gulag, now
you will know about the Chinese Laogai, which needs to take its
place in the annals of human atrocities.
Eurocommunism constitutes a "moment" of great transformation
connecting the past and the present of the European Left, a
political project by means of which left-wing politics in Europe
effected a definitive transition to a thoroughly different
paradigm. It rose in the wake of 1968 - that pivotal year of social
revolt and rethinking that caused a divide between radical,
progressive and socialist thinking in western and southern Europe
and the Soviet model. Communist parties in Italy, France, Spain and
Greece changed tack, drew on the dynamics of social radicalism of
the time and came to be associated with political moderation,
liberal democracy and negotiation rather than contentious politics
forging a movement that would hold influence until the early 1980s.
Eurocommunism thus wove an original political synthesis delineated
against both the revolutionary Left and the social democracy:
"party of struggle and party of governance".
How does the avant-garde create spaces in everyday life that
subvert regimes of economic and political control? How do art,
aesthetics and activism inform one another? And how do strategic
spaces of creativity become the basis for new forms of production
and governance? The Composition of Movements to Come reconsiders
the history and the practices of the avant-garde, from the
Situationists to the Art Strike, revolutionary Constructivism to
Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst, through an autonomist Marxist
framework. Moving the framework beyond an overly narrow class
analysis, the book explores broader questions of the changing
nature of cultural labor and forms of resistance around this labor.
It examines a doubly articulated process of refusal: the refusal of
separating art from daily life and the re-fusing of these
antagonistic energies by capitalist production and governance. This
relationship opens up a new terrain for strategic thought in
relation to everyday politics, where the history of the avant-garde
is no longer separated from broader questions of political economy
or movement, but becomes a point around which to reorient these
considerations.
Following Marx's own itinerary from Paris to London, from politics
to the critique of political economy, The Marx of Communism delves
into a creatively unfolding international debate on the
democracy-communism relation, while supporting a 21st century
communism as a social alternative to capitalism. Taking into
consideration Marx's analysis of communism both as a movement and a
social formation, this study focuses on the dialectics of
transition from capitalism to communism. Dealing with communism as
the outcome of a long-term cultural and political process, the
author defends Marxian communism as the open-ended constitution of
a self-governed demos, whose citizens create their own way of life
on the ground of a stateless and classless society. From this point
of view, the end of the state does not mean the end, but the
revival of politics in terms of a communist bios. Reshaping their
collective and personal values and setting limits to the
production/technology dynamics of their economy, this book argues,
the citizens of a communist polis form a promising antithesis to
the private individuals of a capitalist society.
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